When manufacturing internally and externally toothed cup-shaped sheet material components, for example, cup-shaped clutch plate carriers or similar workpieces with a cylindrical basic structure, high accuracy and precision are required in their production. Particularly important is the accuracy of the true running while adhering to the cylindrical basic structure.
Thus, this involves high quality, cup-shaped sheet material components produced with a tooth-like shape on the inside and the outside which are primarily required in high numbers, also for automatic transmissions. Thus, in addition to quality features, low cost for producing the same is an important aspect for the concept of a production device for such sheet material components.
From German patent, DE 20 17 709, such a method for rolling longitudinal grooves into cylindrical workpieces is known, which method allows to form a wall profile of the sheet material component in a single operation by means of a press.
An adequately designed rolling tool can form a cup-shaped sheet material component (blank) in a single working stroke into an internally and externally tooth-like profiled finished profile. Here, with each press stroke, a rolling process on the sheet material component takes place, wherein a ring-shaped set of profile rollers rolls the desired external profile into the outside surface of the sheet material component.
For this, the set of profile rollers is positioned in the bottom tool of the device around the circumference of the sheet material component to be produced. The sheet material component is fastened in the upper tool by means of a pick-up mandrel. Upon actuation of the upper tool via the ram of the press, the cup-shaped sheet material component is pressed through between the set of rollers.
The profile rollers of the device itself have a relatively small diameter, wherein their axle pins are each supported toward the support ring side by two support rollers during the rolling process.
The support rollers are configured on top of each other in the vertical center plane of the respective profile roller but are inclined at an acute angle with respect to the horizontal, namely, for transferring the occurring rolling forces into the support ring.
Furthermore, the profile rollers can be individually radially preset toward the sheet material component or its pick-up mandrel, respectively, wherein this takes place at the respective receiving body by means of wedge pieces between the pair of support rollers and the outer support ring.
The profile rollers as well as each of their two support rollers are arranged in a single massive receiving body in such a manner that a relatively secure force transfer into the reinforcing ring can take place during the rolling process of longitudinal grooves into the cylindrical workpiece.
The receiving bodies for profile rollers and support rollers are arranged next to one another and spaced apart from one another thereby forming the ring-shaped set of profile rollers.
Thus, the bottom tool can be structured in a rotationally symmetric manner, wherein the profile rollers generating the profile of the sheet material component are regularly distributed and at a uniform angle to one another along the circumference of the sheet material component. Consequently and because of the resulting rotationally symmetric force distribution during the rolling process, the individual grooves produced by the respective profile rollers are virtually identical. In particular, a step-free contour is achieved.
A disadvantage of the method is that different sheet materials from different material batches can result in dimensional deviations with respect to the true running and on the surface. Furthermore, the adjustment of the tool to the specified dimension requires a significant amount of work and time during tool making or repair/maintenance.